Under the federal law, nearly all hourly workers in the U.S. are entitled to overtime pay after 40 hours a week. But many salaried workers are exempt from that requirement — unless they earn below a certain level.

The Labor Department’s now-scuttled rule would have marked the biggest increase to that cap in decades. Employers were required pay overtime to salaried workers who make less than $43,888 a year in certain executive, administrative, and professional roles as of July 1 — and that was set to rise to $58,656 next year.

Related: Coming soon: DOL’s new 401(k) ‘Lost and Found’ database to help find missing plan participants

“Judge Jordan … found that job duties — not salary — are what makes someone an EAP [executive, administrative, or professional] employee, and that by elevating salary over duties to such a meaningful degree, the DOL exceeded its Congressionally-delegated authority to ‘define’ and ‘delimit’ the EAP exemptions,” explained The National Law Review. “As Judge Jordan pointed out, the January 2025 increase would have represented a 65% increase from the salary level in effect before the effective date of the 2024 rule, the effects of which would have been ‘staggering.’”

So where does that leave employers? With an important decision to make, according to Tracy Boland and Raymond R. Ripple, employment law attorneys at Bowditch & Dewey, a Massachusetts-based legal firm.

“The DOL has the option to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,” they noted earlier this week. “However, the viability of any appeal will likely be impacted by the incoming DOL under the Trump administration. To the extent employers already made changes to salary levels (which was reasonable given the 2024 Rule being in effect until now), technically salaries could be reverted back. However, employers would be wise to consider the impact of that on employee morale.”